Paris Gun

The supercannon with which the German army bombarded Paris from the woods
of Crepy from March 1918 to the end of World War I. Also known as the Wilhelm
Geschuetz (after Kaiser Wilhelm II), it is frequently confused with its
immediate predecessor, the Lange Max (Long Max) and also with the Big Berthas
– giant howitzers used by the Germans to smash the Belgian frontier
fortresses, notably that at Liege in 1914. Although the famous Krupp-family
artillery makers produced all these guns, the resemblance ended there.

The Paris Gun was a weapon like no other, capable of hurling a 94-kg shell
to a range of 130 km and a maximum altitude of 40 km – the greatest
height reached by a human-made projectile until the first successful V-2
flight test in October 1942. At the start of its 170-second trajectory,
each shell from the Paris Gun reached a speed of 1,600 m/s (almost five
times the speed of sound). The gun itself, which weighed 256 tons and was
mounted on rails, had a 28-m-long, 210-mm-caliber rifled barrel with a 6-m-long
smoothbore extension. After 65 shells had been fired, each of progressively
larger caliber to allow for wear, the barrel was rebored to a caliber of
240 mm. The German goal of their great cannon was not to destroy France
– it was far too inaccurate a device for that – but to erode
the morale of the Parisians. From March through August of 1918, three of
the guns fired 351 shells at Paris from the woods of Crepy, killing 256
and wounding 620. As a military weapon the gun not a great success: the
payload was minuscule, the barrel had to be regularly replaced, and the
accuracy was only good enough for city-sized targets. But as a psychological
tool it was remembered when the V-1, V-2, and,
in particular, the V-3 were being developed
two decades later. At the end of World War I, one spare mounting was captured
by American troops near Chateau-Thierry, but no gun was ever found.